Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

Second, try to ensure everyone is on equal footing. Don’t offer unsolicited advice or trumpet your wealth or connections. Seek out topics where everyone has some experience and knowledge, or everyone is a novice. Encourage the quiet to speak and the talkative to listen, so everyone is participating.

Whenever he met the parents of a patient, he spent a few minutes finding an identity they had in common. “If they talked about other family members, then I would mention my own family, or if they said they lived nearby, then I would say where I lived,”

taking a moment to formulate what we hope to say, and how we hope to say it, is a good idea.

A What’s This Really About? conversation often occurs at the start of a discussion, and so we’re well served to do a bit of prep work before a dialogue begins.

Looking for what someone needs: Do they want comfort? Empathy? Advice? Tough love? (If you don’t know the answer, loop more.) Asking permission. “Would it be okay if I told you how your words affect me?” or “Would you mind if I shared something from my own life?” or “Can I share how I’ve seen others handle this?” Giving something in return. This ca

All we need to make a prediction is to notice someone’s mood and energy. That’s enough to quickly evaluate what they are feeling.

They haven’t discussed the deeper topics—the emotional issues—that are inflaming the dispute.

High centrality participants tended to ask ten to twenty times as many questions as other participants.

“Mutual playfulness, in-group feeling and positive emotional tone—not comedy—mark the social settings of most naturally occurring laughter,” Provine concluded. Laughter is powerful, he wrote, because it is contagious, “immediate and involuntary, involving the most direct communication possible between people: Brain to brain.”